Tag: death

I’ve been reading Burial Rites by Hannah Kent with a book club I just started with some friends. It’s much more enjoyable to read a book when you have people to discuss it with, but how can anyone ever get their friends to read the same books… if you’re even fortunate enough to have friends who read at all!

So we each submitted some choices, and voted on those choices (can’t vote for your own submissions!) and ended up with a book that everyone at least kind of wanted to read. Success! It wasn’t my top choice, but I was interested!

The novel is based on the true story of an Icelandic woman sentenced to death for murder in 1829, and her last days living on a farm with a family, who are tasked with watching over her while she waits her execution.

This sounded appealing to me, because I always am curious about the mind states of people in extreme situations. What would it be like, knowing you are doomed to die, awaiting the inevitable end day by day… Because it is like a magnified version of all our lives, all will end, all will end definitely, but we pretend they won’t. I find myself curious of what it would be like when you can’t pretend anymore.

I’m about 40% done with it now, and while it is an intriguing read, it’s not what I’d hoped it would be. The story seems to focus more on the family’s perception of her, and her interactions with a priest, and doesn’t delve much into her internal feelings on death. Not so far anyway. It seems to be more about perceptions, and how we decide a person is one way, just because of what others say of them, or judge their entire life and being all based on a single action, a single mistake.

I finished it, and though parts of it made me think and feel and were interesting, overall I was mostly bored and impatient with it.

I enjoyed the close-view narration style of The Stranger a lot more, and maybe if I’d gone into it more expecting a sort of dry historical style account for most of it, I’d have liked it more. The last third of the book did have a lot of good stuff to it though.

The Plague has been getting more interesting. One part I enjoyed was, as the characters are now all quarantined inside the town, and death is all around, one character is sitting in his house trying to write a book, and rewriting the same sentence for days and weeks, trying to find just the right words. He’s asking his friends for advice, agonizing over it, switching out words for similar ones, and then putting them back, and so on. All while hundreds of people are dying all around him every day.

But we’re all dying, right? Even if these characters survive the plague, they’ll just die five or ten or twenty years later. So why not spend your time fussing over the first sentence of a book you’ll never write?

Are the American people okay with this? Each week and month and year that goes by with nothing being done tells me that most are.

Imagine a world in which you can buy a tank at your local car dealership. Imagine in this world, that every month or so some crazy gets their tank on credit with no license or training, and that same day drives through his local neighborhood crushing cars and people and shooting houses until the military can get there to stop him.

Well, that is a lot of death and damage caused all the time, constantly, by crazy or evil or bigoted people getting into tanks.

But, we can’t do anything about that, can we? I need to have my right to buy and drive a tank responsibly if I want to. Not having to be licensed or trained or evaluated in any way when I want to go buy my second or third tank in the future, is much more important to me than making sure only responsible people own tanks. You see, if any kind of control over tank-buying is put in place, everyone might lose their right to own tanks at all!

It’s just something we have to live with, in a free world where everyone can own tanks and drive them in public.

Well you know what? I don’t want to live in a world where everyone can own their own tank, or rocket launcher or bandoleer of grenades. And I don’t want to live in a world where everyone owns a gun.

Call me whatever names you want, call me unpatriotic, call me a liberal snowflake, call me angry or scared or call me fascist or call me socialist. But the less tanks there are, the less crushed cars and destroyed houses there are. The less hand grenades there are, the less explosions there are. The less flame throwers there are, the less house-fires and melted people there are.

Like this:

Several scientists in recent news articles have been stating that they think we live in a computer simulation. They think the odds of this are very high. What question that leaves unanswered, is whether we are a creation of whoever wrote the simulation, or if we are self inserts in the simulation. In other words, are we also simulations, or are we the creators of the simulation, living in it but without memory of entering it? The former seems much more likely.

What kind of world do the creators of our simulation live in? Is it an experiment forgotten about and left running? Is it known across the land by everyone? Is it someones personal project and they have complete control over it and us? Are there ‘simulations rights’ laws that would prevent our creator from abusing us for their own amusement?

Mostly this sounds like a terrible thought. One more afterlife to worry about…

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Jonas David is a science fiction writer born and raised and living in the Seattle area. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, IGMS and others. Additional writing and info can be found at jonas-david.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @thejonasdavid.